BACKGROUND Snakebites in snake handlers are an important clinical problem that may differ to bites in the general population. AIM To investigate the epidemiology and clinical presentation of bites in snake handlers. DESIGN Prospective observational study. METHODS Bites in snake handlers recruited as part of the Australian Snakebite Project (ASP) from 2004 to 2011 were included in the stud...

Climate change will result in some areas becoming warmer and others cooler, and will amplify the magnitude of year-to-year thermal variation in many areas. How will such changes affect animals that rely on ambient thermal heterogeneity to behaviourally regulate their body temperatures? To explore this question, we raised 43 captive-born tiger snakes Notechis scutatus in enclosures that provided...

Snakes exhibit an apparent dichotomy in the regulation of gastrointestinal (GI) performance with feeding and fasting; frequently feeding species modestly regulate intestinal function whereas infrequently feeding species rapidly upregulate and downregulate intestinal function with the start and completion of each meal, respectively. The downregulatory response with fasting for infrequently feedi...

Locating the boundary of a head in a head-and-shoulders image is an important problem in model based coding. An approach to this problem using adaptive contour models or 'snakes' is presented. The paper provides a tutorial introduction to the theory of snakes and shows in some detail how they may be implemented using a finite difference method. Some experimental results are presented showing sn...

We purified specific 31/36 kDa antigenic molecules from sparganum in different intermediate hosts (snakes and mice) and analyzed their monosaccharide compositions. Compositional analysis showed that glucose and mannose concentrations were 2-3 fold higher in the 31/36 kDa molecule purified from snakes than those from mice. This result implies that antigenic glycoproteins of sparganum from snakes...

Snakes have been used extensively in locating object boundaries. However, in the medical imaging field, many organs in close proximity have similar intensity values, limiting the usefulness of snakes in segmentation of abdominal organs. In this paper, we use the gradient vector flow snake to test the benefits of running snakes on texture features from a Markov Random Fields model as opposed to ...